Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Back to school

So another year begins. s2, p4, and p7 - the magical year, or rather the one that is meant to be magical anyway. Most of p7 focuses on growing up, maturing, preparing to leave the only school you've ever known, and widening your friend group to prepare for a class full of strangers, with the odd familiar face. For Anna, this was always going to be a poignant year, as she is one of the youngest in her class and unlike her three predecessors, not quite as full of joy to venture onwards and upwards. I have no doubts that by next June Kirkhill will have worked its wonders and got her ready and excited for Mearns Castle, but she definitely isn't going into p7, desperate to rush out the other side!

With Brexit, it's going to be an even harder year for Anna. While her friends feel anxious at the thought of moving together to a school ten minutes away, Anna has at the back of her head that this could be her last year in an English-speaking school, in the only country she's ever known as home with all the friends she has in the world. With a deal already negotiated, she would have had a full year to psych herself up, even for the unthinkable to her, which would be moving abroad to a school speaking Danish, or worse still one speaking a language she doesn't know many words of, such as German, but with the government's dithering and game-playing, lives of families, adults and children alike, are up in the air. At fifty I am finding it hard to prepare myself mentally for what lies ahead, as I ride the roller coaster of 'today we probably have to leave, tomorrow we maybe don't' over and over and over with every new headline and reneged promise. What this is doing to the mental health of our ten year olds is unimaginable and also unforgivable.

Let's hope she gains some clarity soon, and hope even harder it is clarity which will allow her life to go on happily as it always has with her wonderful friends in her lovely school, following in the footsteps of her older siblings.